Joomla Example

[Chris Kenniburg]

We use Joomla for a K-12 environment

http://dearbornschools.org

 

I only see a few posts on this group.  Maybe mine will revive it.

[Stuart Elliot]

For myself, it's just that I have moved away from joomla in favour of other opensource options. Specifically concrete5 (www.concrete5.org) - its just so much easier to template/develop/roll out/train people to use.

I did have a support call from someone yesterday for an 'old' joomla site I had done, after poking around in the backend to solve their query I quickly remembered why I had made the switch...

 

Dont get me wrong, you can build great sites in joomla, I just feel it's quite constraining (ie you are 'forced' into doing things in a particular way) whereas other systems are a lot more flexible (imo).  And if you are building a relatively small site joomla feels a little like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut

[Chris Kenniburg]

Hello Stuart,

I must admit I have been interested in concrete5.  It just seems like a lot of work to switch over.  I have been using Joomla since it split from Mambo.  

 

I guess it is the fear of learning something new and starting from scratch.

[Stuart Elliot]

honestly you could port a (not that big..) site over in a hour - I have done this multiple times now

 

It really is easy to use and the templating is sooo easy - you'll be able to re-use your existing joomla templates (the source php file/css - dont need the xml etc) and just change the php calls

 

- I sound like I work for them - but I don't, honest!

 

If you find you have an hour to spare, just download and install it and do the templating tutorial - I 99.9% guarantee after an hour of playing you'll be hooked :)

 

This is a good tutorial (well its the one I learnt from anyway)

concrete5 templates

 

I would say that as it isn't as established as Joomla there aren't nearly as many addons floating about, but they are growing steadily every month (and there are a lot more out there then when I started using it just over a year ago). But becuase of the MVC architecture its actually pretty easy to write your own (and there are lots of tutorials to help).

 

As a final push to encourage you to have a go - every single developer I have shown it to (about 14 to date) now exclusively use c5 for all of their projects (who were previously using a variety of open source cms' from joomla, drupal, expression engine and so on). 

 

I think one big difference that I really like (and means you can be more flexible design wise) is that the system uses pages rather than articles that you publish to a given page - that used to drive me nuts in joomla :)

[Norma J Dowell]

I would be curious to know how c5 is now to you.  I am a long-time Joomla user and develop websites with it.  Joomla 3 is in beta right now and looks promising.  I agree with you about the articles instead of pages - I get around that using HTML modules - but without completely switching to a new CMS, it would be interesting to know how the two compare now in your mind.

Thanks!